Translation Journal Digest

There is a wide selection of magazines and journals related to translating, interpreting and linguistics on the outstanding Directory of Open Access Journals. I wanted to share some of the articles I have been looking at – not all of them are directly related to the sort of work we do at QuickSilver, but this selection gives a taste of some of the fascinating research being done across the world.

This article explains the rules of interaction and norms of interpretation of the communicative event “el levante” (picking someone up). It refers to non-verbal behavior of seduction in the first stage of courtship. The content shows the influence of the dominant genre role for seduction in the observed spaces. It exposes how men and women reproduce in their body movements the expected behavior stereotypes in our culture.

The aim of this article is to highlight some aspects of these problems by bringing to the fore the interconnections between the question of translation and the general issue of culture. More specifically, the emphasis will be put on the interpretive dimension of translation and the peculiarities of the translator’s interpretive moves within different worlds of significations.

Teaching Don Quijote de la Mancha in translation is an enterprise fraught with perils. Texts read in translation should afford what Venuti calls “an illusion of transparency”, yet, more often than not, the translator crops up in the most unexpected places obscuring the author’s intention and domesticating the text to the point that it becomes almost unrecognizable. Although a good translator strives to “acculturate” the reader with pointed cues designed to ease the passage through the narrative, sometimes this effect is difficult to achieve.

In interpretation situations, shifting from one language of interpretation to another (i.e. from language a and language x to language a and language y) is an unusual but not unknown phenomenon. It can only occur in interactions between multilingual clients and multilingual interpreters, typically when clients wish to shift to their dominant language and interpreters also have proficiency in this language.

Chinese translators have hitherto devised three strategies to render English metrical poetry into Chinese: sinolization, liberal translation, and poetic form transplantation. Translators practicing the methods of sinolization and liberal translation belong to the group in favor of spiritual resemblance.